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Intervening Spaces: Women Friendships in the Novels of Olga Grjasnowa

Mon, December 17, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cambridge 2

Abstract

This paper examines the meaning of women friendship in the novels of the German-Jewish-Azerbaijani-Russian writer Olga Grjasnowa (born in 1984). The protagonists of her books Der Russe ist einer der Birken liebt, 2012 (All Russians love Birch Trees, English translation published in 2014) and Die juristische Unschärfe einer Ehe, 2014 (A legal Haziness of a Marriage, no English translation) are young women, both moving between cultures, languages, as well as erotic and emotional adventures.
In both cases relationships of women are most crucial to the plot and connected to the ‘Jewishness’ of the protagonists:
Maria “Mascha” Kogan, the first-person narrator of All Russians loves Birch trees, leaves Germany and tries to begin a new life in Tel Aviv after the tragic death of her boyfriend. The intimate friendship with Tal, a young Israeli woman with a traumatic past, helps her on the one hand to come to terms with the traumatic loss. On the other hand, it reveals the complexity of transgression: Israel – as represented by Tal – is not her final destination, and thus, it does not constitute a ‘home’ for the narrator.
Leyla, the main character of A legal Haziness of a Marriage, born in Baku and resides in Berlin, is a former ballerina who is married to Altay, her gay friend psychiatrist. The marriage is just an illusion for their families in Azerbaijan. This construct begins to crumble after Leyla’s falling in love with Jonoun, an American-Israeli artist. Hence, the two women start a road trip: beginning with “the dichotomy of identity and alterity”, they try to find “stability in fluctuation”. (Wójcik 2015)
As implied in the hyphenated biography of the author as well as in her main characters (biographical overlaps are blatantly obvious) the negotiations of a female-Jewish post-Soviet-German self-localization are a central topic of both novels. Thus, the multifaceted female characters and their relationships mirror the dynamic and the limits of hybridity.

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